Education

Overview For this assignment, we learned how to apply materials to the objects we’ve been creating. There are many, many different ways to construct a material that you apply to 3D object. They can be procedurally generated, they can pull from textures (or maps) you create, and you can manually tune many parameters as well. Maps are a great way to control the appearance of an object because you can make something resemble a real object quite quickly by just taking a picture and doing a bit of editing....

Overview For this assignment, we learned a few new techniques, namely how to make use of 2D shapes to give more detail to our models. Beyond simple shapes like circles and squares is the very flexible spline, which gives you a lot of control over how a line is drawn, while still be purely analytical. Shapes and Splines For part of the homework, we added some shapes and splines to our existing models....

Overview For this week’s assignment, we jumped out of the normal curriculum and went straight to using a game engine with our models from last time. We added a few common elements, like terrain and fog. Unity Unity is a lot of fun to work with! It’s quite easy to assemble something pretty cool, and yet it is also has a lot of depth to allow you to refine details. I can definitely see myself working with this down the road, especially given the wide multi-platform support....

Overview For our first assignment, we had to build a robot and an environment for the it to inhabit. Robot The robot had to use exactly 1000 polygons. I chose to create a kind of transport robot with a cute appearance. I used an elongated egg shape, and gave it two propellers to maneuver. The robot is shown at an angle to suggest movement. The propellers were fun to construct, especially with the primitives, since you have to think of clever ways to build what want from just a few shapes....

I’ve started taking classes at ACC to learn some visual design skills and generally extend my knowledge of how games and other media are built. The first one is this 3D modeling class, and I’ll be maintaining a portfolio of my work as this class goes on. I’m excited to see what I can come up with! Undoubtedly my work won’t win too many awards, but hopefully I can pick up the principles and develop them further over time....